In 1999 I broke my London-Sydney flight in Singapore, postponed my onward leg for 30 days and caught a ferry to Batam, an Indonesian island where it was easy to go through customs.

I caught a ferry to mainland Sumatra and a bus across to Bukittinggi (crossing the equator). I stayed for a week at Lake Maninjau, in a guest house run by a Muslim family, next to a mosque. Every morning I was woken up by the call to prayer. It was a beautiful, peaceful place and the locals were welcoming, friendly and I decided that someday I would return there after learning to speak some Bahasa Indonesia.

It was election time and a wild-eyed guy in Islamic robes came to town and gave a speech from the back of a wagon, and pointed an angry finger at me as I walked past (I guess I was the evil west). People in the crowd were clearly not taking him seriously.

I travelled through Sumatra and over to Java, on a bus full of local Muslim people who looked after me (with food and safety concerns). I reached Jakarta just before election day 1999, and my hotel was full of western journalists in flak jackets looking for trouble. Nothing happened, in fact everyone basically had a party and voted.

I went down to Jogjakarta and was shown around by a kind old Muslim tour guide, and again the singing from the mosques was a highlight. Then I travelled down to Bali, saw the festering tourist strip, fled to the rural areas and stayed my final two nights alone in a house in the middle of a rice paddy in a Hindu town (Bali is a Hindu island in a mostly Muslim country). It was peaceful, safe and just plain great.

A couple of years later 9/11 happened and everyone was more apprehensive about going to Muslim countries, but I still planned to go back to Indonesia someday because I knew the people were mostly peaceful and welcoming of foreigners. I remembered my bus companions practically clinging to me on the ferry from Sumatra to Java, making sure I was OK in their country.

Then in 2002 the Bali bombings happened, killing 202 mostly Australians and Balinese (and the ignorant pricks who carried it out thought they were bombing American sailors on shore leave). Then for bullshit reasons we invaded Iraq together, driving an even bigger wedge between cultures.

So now I'm typing this after the second wave of Bali bombings, which have kept me up all night because I run websites in the news media. Before I go to bed, I just have one thing to say to terrorists and neocons alike, not that it makes any difference here: FUCK YOU, PATHETIC, UNREPRESENTATIVE, WARMONGERING MINORITIES.

I'm sick of having my world ruined more and more by people that don't even try to understand, who think violence solves anything. All I have is memories of a better time, and I'll probably never get back to Indonesia, ordinary people are being turned into grieving relatives, and kids are growing up on both sides thinking it's some kind of unfriendly, threatening culture over there. Not fair.